Archives (page 61 of 464)

July 10, 2020 / 38 Comments

How The Sweet Hot Hell Are We Gonna Open Schools?

So, there’s this pandemic, right? A real corker of a coronavirus — some people get li’l colds, some people get pneumonia, others have organs attacked, suffer strokes, or endure long-lasting neurological symptoms. And we’ve no idea if there are longer-term problems waiting in the wings. Like I said the other day, polio could wage additional damage decades after you had it.

In this pandemic, we shut the country down. Sorta. Partly. Some states went whole hog, others half-assed it, and now we’re all varying degrees of “reopened,” and cases are surging. All because we didn’t do shit, really, as a country. Some states did well. My state, PA, is doing… pretty okay? Better than a lot, not as good as some of our Northeast counterparts. But nationwide, as a whole, we took allllllll that time locked down to accomplish… eeeyyyyeaaaannnhhh, very, very little.

And now, in many places, it’s worse than it was in March. Worse than the conditions that triggered the lockdown in the first place.

We were on a train driving toward a broken track over the edge of the cliff, and we wisely said, “We’d better slow this beast down, lest we go off the edge,” so we slowed it down… but then… kinda did nothing? We didn’t build new tracks. We didn’t construct a bridge. We didn’t even cover the train in pillows and bounce-houses in the hopes it lessened our impact, if we had to go over the cliff.

We just bided our time and then started speeding up again.

The track is still broken.

The cliff is still ahead.

And the train is full of children.

What I’m saying is, how the hell are we supposed to open schools again?

Consider the following problem —

Soon, it’s going to be cold-and-flu season. That can start as early as September around these parts, and really gets its roots in by winter. Hell, autumn brings allergies, too.

Now, let’s say a kid, or a teacher, starts to have symptoms of one or the other.

Sniffles, sneezes, runny noses, coughs. A temperature.

Is it COVID-19?

Well, you won’t know, so whaddya gonna do? Just casually remove them? The virus is catchier than a Rick-Roll, and often before you even show symptoms. You pretend it’s fine, you could make sure that everyone gets it, that it runs a race around everyone in school.

So, the likely answer is, you have to shut down the school, or at least that class, until the person is tested. And once again, testing is harder to get across the country. If you can get a test, then some people are receiving results in 7-14 days. For a while there it was faster, but remember SLOW DOWN THE TESTING, PLEASE, from our erstwhile shitberg of a president? Yeah. His wish was our command, and now testing is half-fucked again. So, if the person with the coughing-sniffles gets a test, it could be two weeks before results roll in.

Two weeks where people have to freak the fuck out that maybe their kids, or the teachers, or the parents, or whoever, caught the thing that may or may not be the virus that may or may not leave you with lasting long-time damage. That’s a very big Schroedinger’s Cat situation, isn’t it?

Then, then, assume that people are going to also get this thing. Not just cold. Not just flu. But people are going to get it. Statistically, that’s gonna happen, and I’m betting it happens in the first month of school. A kid, a teacher, an admin, a parent, or even someone secondarily connected to those people — a grandparent, a neighbor, whatever, someone where there has been exposure.

Now what?

Well, again, you probably gotta shut shit down.

So, best case scenario, you’ve got a rolling series of openings and shutdowns, blunting any educational momentum the kids and teachers gain. All while school is surely hamstrung anyway, because there’s no way you can run a school the way you did before in the midst of all this.

Given that even a single cough or elevated temperature could totally knee-cap your entire school for two weeks… how’s this supposed to work? What’s the point? Why even bother opening? It’s a futile gesture, like trying to thread a needle with a blowdart from across a crowded room. I guess it’s not impossible but oof. Of course, the Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head is that parents have to work and that means they have to send their kids to school and then there are kids who need school for meals and education (obviously) and social growth and maybe even an escape from abusive or problematic families. But federally, we have no response for this, no planning, no way forward — and a lot of states don’t have much of a clue, either. So onward the train goes, chug-chug-chug, choo-choo, and we know the tracks are busted, we know there’s no bridge, it’s only a cliff ahead and a damning drop to the hard ground below. But we keep going. The train keeps a rollin’.

July 9, 2020 / 26 Comments

Follow The River, No Matter Its Rapids, No Matter Its Turns

It’s a lot right now.

I think if we can agree on anything, anything at all between us, it’s that everything is a whole lot. It’s too much. It’s a pandemic and an election and protests (which are good!) and we’re all trapped in a glowing LeMarchand’s Box with Trump and there’s climate change on the near horizon and did I mention there’s a pandemic? A big, scary, lung-punching, brain-tweaking pandemic? If you’re not screaming into a couch cushion soaked with gin right now, who even are you?

There’s been renewed interest in a post I wrote in 2017 — Ways to Stay Motivated in this Shit-Shellacked Era of Stupid — and with the rise on views on that post, there’s also been a renewed bevy of emails headed by way from writers who are foundering and floundering in all of this *gesticulates wildly* going on around us. Certainly these emails echo my own mindset, which is — after a garbled gargle of inchoate rage and bewilderment — how are we supposed to write during this? How the hell am I supposed to put pen to paper, fingers to keys, and type out something that is even vaguely cogent, much less even a little bit escapist? How are sentences not just strings of profanity and ASCII garbage, how are our stories not just 300 pages of wasps stinging ignorant bigots in their mouths? How do you not type with your fists, how do you not tell these stories through your clenched and cracking teeth? How are our books not just screams?

And I don’t…

…have a great answer for that.

Because there is no great answer. There is only — as there often is in hospitals right now — triage. We’re all just trying to hold it together. Deadlines or no deadlines, the words must flow, but sometimes it’s a trickle, and sometimes it’s a violent bar-night vomiting.

But here’s what I’m thinking.

I’m thinking all of this is a river. It’s a dark, fast river. It crawls serpentine through the earth, through the forests. Sometimes it moves slow, other times it’s all rapids. Sometimes it is eerily serene, and sometimes it’s rough enough to knock your teeth into your knees and draw blood. It’s waterfalls and eddies, it’s deep and it’s cold. Like all rivers, it can soothe you, and it can betray you.

This river, the river we’re in and on now — it’s harder, meaner, a river after a flood, a river whose waters are not sated, who will not abate. It’s mudded up and frothing like the muzzle of a rabid wolf.

You can fight against that river.

We often do, in writing. We often go against our own moods, against the news of the world, against bad reviews and against poisoned thinking. Our work is often an act of anchoring our boots against the soft slick weeds and the water-smoothed stones and move against the current.

Upstream, stories can be born.

Sometimes, though, I think you gotta do the other thing.

Sometimes, you go the other way.

You go with the flow.

You run with the river, not against it.

And what that means, practically speaking is, you let it happen. What you’re feeling, what you’re seeing, sometimes those elements demand to be seen in the work. Sometimes the river is the channel that feeds the narrative sea, and that means you need to put it in there, out there, all over it. You don’t escape. You confront. You ride the turns, you rough out the rapids, you take all your fear and your anger and your confusion and you put it on the page. And not even in a way of trying to write something that’s marketable or sellable — but just trying to speak honestly about who you are, about the world in which we’re living, and about your grappling with all of it. It’s not even about writing a cogent book or a collective piece. It can be about taking the time to punch that keyboard and scream onto the page — if only to clear the water and find time to climb back onto shore to write something else. It can be the thing you’re writing, or it can be a way to get to the thing you’re writing.

I don’t mean to suggest this as good “advice” — it’s certainly no requirement. You have to do what feels best and right — and, further, what feels most productive in the direction you need to be going. I’m only saying that, if it’s that much of a slog, if the slow churning march upriver and against the current feels like you’re fighting too hard and losing to the pressure, turn around and go the other way. Sometimes we want to, even need to, write about what’s going on inside our heads and our hearts. Sometimes we can’t ignore the room on fire. Sometimes we can’t get out of the river or go against it. And in those cases, let the waters take you. Write what needs to be written. Write what the river tells you to write. Follow the water, and see where you go.

(P.S.? You can always edit it later.)

July 8, 2020 / 24 Comments

Gabbling Into The Void 5: The Void, in 3-D

HULLO HULLO. It is I, your bearded Charon guiding you down the rivers of the Underworld. Come, take a boat ride with me to the bubbliest, barmiest of blogtowns.

I’m reminded of polio. I know, starting off real exciting, right? Polio? JFC. I’m just saying, polio is one of those diseases where it infected a lot of people — but a bunch didn’t show symptoms, a bunch got the equivalent of a flu, and a smaller percentage ended up with muscle problems, paralysis, and death. Then, as if that weren’t sucky enough, some folks got a follow-up round of PPS (Post-Polio Syndrome) anywhere from 15-40 years later. And they don’t know why. Because viruses are weird.

What I’m trying to say is, take COVID very seriously. In particular, take warnings about neurological damage with considerable concern. Further, it’s worth realizing that survival — while good! — doesn’t mean a life free from symptoms or problems. We need to stop pretending like this is just the flu, like you get it and move on, like we understand the margins of this thing. We don’t. Even with a vaccine, its effects will be with us for a while. Wear a mask. Try to remain distant. Stop going to parties and bars, for shit’s sake.

In better news, Far Side is back. I mean, holy shit. The Far Side is back?!

Some TV I’m enjoying? I started up both The Boys and Doom Patrol and… okay, listen, I wasn’t sure about The Boys. I kinda figured it was gonna be a bro-town meh-fest, but I should’ve have doubted. It’s great. I’m digging it. And Doom Patrol? Who knew? Both are squirrely, dark takes on the superhero thing, and I’m not super into the dark takes right now, but what can I say? What works, works. And these work. What shows or movies have you been digging?

I got a hammock. Its singular purpose was for reading — to disconnect from the world and to pick up a physical book and just read it. My pleasure reading has been erratic as hell since all this started, but lemme tell you, I started Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song yesterday, and in a blink, I was 100 pages deep. I haven’t read 100 pages of a book in one sitting since before the Quarantimes. Ironically, it’s a book about a virus — an upgraded rabies virus. It’s horrifying. Tremblay is a monster. A wonderful monster who is a helluva writer. What are you reading right now?

I saw a video that has made me laugh so hard I wept. It’s Akilah and Milana. Just watch it and improve your life one thousand percent.

A casual reminder that you can find me on Instagram. It’s @chuck_wendig over yonder.

Our garden doth grow. Been eating snap peas, which have been sweet. Our radish days are gone. Got kale that needs harvesting. Shishito peppers blooming. Peas starting. And something called “Dragon Beans” which are, no joke, growing taller than anything we have supporting them, so I’m pretty sure they’re some kind of mythological legume. We also used compost to help jump start our blueberries, but I guess the compost had squash seeds in them because now the blueberries have some squash buddies growing alongside them? I’m sure that’s fine.

Beer me, barkeep. I had something called Cocoa Cow from Sunriver and hot dang that was good. It’s like dessert, except it’s beer? I wanna put some vanilla ice cream in it. Because if you’re going to be unhealthy, you might as well press pedal and pitter-patter.

So it’s been a year, now. Happy birthday, Wanderers. The little big book has been out for a full year, and it’s done very well and I’m happy, but do you remember when it was fiction hahaha aaaaghhaaAAAAGHHHH yeah me too. Also holy shit, it’s at 989 reviews at Amazon — ?! That’s a helluva thing. I’m still very proud of the book. It was serendipitous in the writing and the reception, and equally so — if more troubling — in how it occasionally would come to mirror some of reality. I don’t think the book’s journey is over, and it continues (somehow?) to sell pretty well, and I’m just glad it’s out there and did okay. I remember taking a road trip to do research for it and — wow, remember road trips? Remember going places? Remember doing stuff outside your house. Of course, because we live in Two Americas, there are lots of people who remember those things well, because they just did them like, last week. Half our local cases are from people who thought, “Now’s a good time to go to Myrtle Beach, where I can rub my nose in some coronavirus with lime, baby.” Seriously, our cases in PA are coming from out of state. Because people just can’t be smart and keep it under control. IF I DON’T GO TO THE BEACH I’LL DIE, they say, before going to beach and catching a disease that could kill them. Cool cool cool, extremely cool.

I have all kinds of news I can’t yet share. One day I’ll share it. For now I’m sitting on a nest of eggs that only I know are there. HATCH, LITTLE NEWS GOSLINGS, HATCH.

ANYWAY that’s all she wrote, I think.

Wear a mask.

Here’s a flower.

July 8, 2020 / 2 Comments

Andrea Phillips: The Corporation As Tool

I’m often wont to say that plot is Soylent Green — it’s made of people. Meaning, people make decisions, and that’s what forms an overarching plot or story, not some external hero’s myth, not some skeletal framework of A to B to C. And that’s in narrative, yes, but it also translates to the real world. Science and history are both driven by people — their decisions, their choices, their observations and recordings. And here, Andrea Phillips — with her new novel, America, Inc. out this week — talks a bit about the idea of the corporation, and how it relates to the individual:

***

My name is Andrea Phillips, I think corporations get a bad rap that they don’t entirely deserve. I even wrote a book called America Inc. that’s about a corporation running for president of the U.S. — and they’re the good guys. See, I think the corporation is just a tool, and like every tool, it can be used for good or for evil.

In the beginning, corporate personhood was a great idea. The whole point was to legally separate a business from its owners. That way they wouldn’t be ruined if something went wrong and the business went under — say a ship was lost at sea, or the shop burned down.

Recognizing the business as a separate legal entity created a shield that meant the people the business owed money to couldn’t come after the owner’s house, couldn’t take all of their life savings, couldn’t take the lollipops from the mouths of their children. That doesn’t seem so bad, right?

So why do people hate corporations today? That tool fell into the wrong hands. They’ve taken the legal and financial shield and applied it to other areas of responsibility. It’s become a moral shield, too.

When Deepwater Horizon spilled hundreds of millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, we blamed BP. When researchers discovered diesel cars cheating their way through emissions testing, we blamed Volkswagen. When the 737 Max turned out to have gone into service with fatal flaws, we blamed Boeing.

But each one of those incidents is the result of decisions and actions taken by individual people — and not just one or two, but a cascade of people all choosing to do the wrong thing.

This also applies to business practices. It’s easy shorthand to talk about Amazon’s monopoly power or Wal-Mart’s decision to underpay their workers. But Amazon didn’t decide anything. Wal-Mart didn’t, either. In a very concrete way, neither Amazon nor Wal-Mart even exist. You can’t touch them, and you certainly can’t throw them in a jail cell. Every one of those actions is a choice that some asshole made — some asshole who took on the mantle of the corporation to shield him from the consequences.

The corporation isn’t the problem. The problem is a cultural and legal structure that absolves individuals of moral and criminal culpability for the choices they’ve made. The problem is letting those assholes run things without consequences.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

OK, fine. Sometimes, in the most egregious of cases, we’ll throw a few assholes in jail. Sometimes, though, the people who wind up in hot water aren’t the ones who made the original decision; they’re just water-carriers following orders for the people who sign their checks.

We could be doing a lot more. We could be exercising punishments for corporate malfeasance with more bite than skimming off a fraction of a percent of profits in fines. We could and should create a criminal framework that punishes both businesses and decision makers for their antisocial, anti-environmental, anticompetitive choices.

Creating sweeping change like that is hard and slow. In the meantime, all of us have to operate within this corrupt system. There’s no escaping it. But that doesn’t mean we have to be corrupt ourselves.

Individuals have much more power than they realize. Every day, we make choices, and our little choices can add up ripple by ripple to become a great wave of change. We’ve seen it in #MeToo, where each person calling out the instigator of their harassment emboldens others to share their experiences and enforce a new cultural acceptance that that kind of shit isn’t okay. We’re seeing it right now with Black Lives Matter, where years of tremendous work of Black activists has finally stirred even apathetic white people to protest and to support massive changes in police use of force, disciplinary processes, and funding.

I’m not saying that little by little we can change the complicated international financial-legal system on our own. But in your own workplace, you can be a sticky cog, finding ways to prevent evil and ways to do good. Every business that sent out an email supporting Black Lives Matter did that because an individual at that company made a choice — a moral choice. We can all find ways to try to make our workplaces less racist, or less exploitative, even if it’s just by example.

Me, I’m just a reclusive author. I can’t press my employer to, say, make Juneteenth a paid holiday because I don’t have one. So for my part, I’m donating 15% of net profits from sales of America Inc. to Common Cause, a nonprofit that works to protect voting writes in the United States.

Be the change. It’s got to start somewhere. And once you start, you just might discover you’re not as alone as you thought.

***

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning immersive experience designer and author. Her short fiction includes the critically acclaimed novelette The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike. America, Inc. is its novel-length sequel. Her other books include Revision, The Daring Adventures of Lucy Smokeheart, and A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. She also created the Serial Box LitRPG project Alternis, and co-authored Bookburners and ReMade. You can find her on Twitter at @andrhia. I mean, if you like that sort of thing.

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

America, Inc.: Buy Now

July 7, 2020 / 2 Comments

Matt Wallace: Five Things I Learned Writing Savage Legion

They call them Savages. Brutal. Efficient. Expendable.

The empire relies on them. The Savages are the greatest weapon they ever developed. Culled from the streets of their cities, they take the ones no one will miss and throw them, by the thousands, at the empire’s enemies. If they live, they fight again. If they die, there are always more to take their place.

Evie is not a Savage. She’s a warrior with a mission: to find the man she once loved, the man who holds the key to exposing the secret of the Savage Legion and ending the mass conscription of the empire’s poor and wretched.

But to find him, she must become one of them, to be marked in her blood, to fight in their wars, and to find her purpose. Evie will die a Savage if she has to, but not before showing the world who she really is and what the Savage Legion can really do.

***

I didn’t know how to write an epic fantasy novel.

I grew up reading sprawling fantasy sagas, from Dragonlance to Pern to Forgotten Realms. While that did a good job of schooling me on the tropes of those novels I wanted to avoid and/or examine, it did not, as it turns out, prepare me to write one. I tend towards short form fiction naturally, and structuring something so long and of such scope spun me around something fierce. I had to trash and restart SAVAGE LEGION at least twice, and oddly the only thing that ended up saving me was falling ass-backwards into writing a series of novellas. I solved my structuring problems by viewing my epic fantasy as three novellas which would compose three acts and feature three POV characters (the number three just started to make sense to me, I guess). If I hadn’t embedded that in my brain as a guide, I never would’ve finished the book.

The line between giving yourself time and living in fear is razor-thin.

It took me longer to write this novel than any other work I’ve ever produced. It was at least four or five years from the first word I typed to handing off the first draft to my agent. I needed the time to teach myself how to write this book, but there definitely came a point when I left it sitting for long periods because, quite simply, I’d become afraid of it. It was too much. Mentally, emotionally, physically. And the more time I left it alone, the easier it became to keep doing that and the harder it became to return to it. While I do believe some of those years were vital to figuring the book out and arriving at the final draft we did, if I’m being honest with myself I probably could’ve cut those years in half by dealing with the unhealthy caverns of that fear instead of letting it fester and so often steer me.

The smallest piece of advice can change your entire world. Literally.

This book was originally (in the long-long ago) going to be titled WILD MAN. After a time, the exclusiveness of that title began to bug me. I talked to author Kameron Hurley about it, who told me how she reacted when she first heard Star Trek’s famous opening narration make the change from “where no man has gone before” to “where no one has gone before” and her emotional reaction to it. Needless to say, it was a profound moment for her, one of inclusion she didn’t even know she craved that deeply. Her story, her perspective, not only led me to a new title, it ended up completely altering my view of the novel and its world. I’ve often and publicly credited Hurley with helping me reshape this novel, and Hurley always reacts incredulously and dismissively. “What, that thing about the title?” she once asked me when I brought it up. It was a brief and innocuous bit of craft exchange to her, but to me it was vital and formative.

Your novel is only as good as the village that helps you raise it.

My writing career up to this point had been very isolated and insular. I never liked anyone “telling me how to write,” as I saw it. SAVAGE LEGION completely changed my perspective on that. It started with my agent, who is also an experienced editor. My actual editor at Saga Press, Navah Wolfe, was as much collaborator as overseer. Our sensitivity readers who were integral to informing the experiences of the characters who aren’t like me. I needed them all, and I am 100% convinced SAVAGE LEGION wouldn’t be the book I believe it is without every single one of them. I’ve never allowed so many people inside my process before, and I am grateful that I did, but more importantly, I’m grateful they were the right people for this book. That dynamic is paramount. It’s not about getting a bunch of notes from a bunch of folks, it’s about finding the right perspectives to inform your process and the work itself.

It’s worth the years it took to write because you finished it.

This is a shitty time to have a book coming out. There are vastly more attention-consuming and frankly more important things happening than a story I wrote. Pandemics, civil uprising, rooting out predators and racism in every industry and field. There have also been a lot of behind-the-scenes issues with the publication of this book I won’t go into here. Needless to say, I’ve been very discouraged as we approach release day for SAVAGE LEGION. What I’ve ultimately learned, however, is you can’t replace time. No amount of fanfare or recognition or sales numbers will give me back the years I put into writing this book. In the end, it is either worth the cost of time to you as the author or it isn’t. For me, I’ve decided the years I spent on this book weren’t a waste, because I finished it. I did what I set out to do, and the book is exactly what I wanted it to be. Nothing else really matters, not in the final tally.

***

Matt Wallace is a retired professional wrestler and the author of the Sin du Jour novella series (Tor.com Publishing), as well as the Savage Rebellion series (Saga Press). His debut middle-grade novel, Bump, is scheduled to be released in 2021 by Katherine Tegen Books. In 2018, alongside co-host Mur Lafferty, he took home the Hugo Award for their podcast, Ditch Diggers. In addition to writing for several television series, Matt has also done extensive narrative work on video game titles for publishers such as inXile Entertainment. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Nikki, and maintains a steady Twitter presence @MattFnWallace, as well as a more sporadic presence on YouTube with his channel, Angry Writer.

Matt Wallace: Website | Twitter

Savage Legion: Print | eBook

July 1, 2020 / 21 Comments

Gabbling Into The Void 4: The Quest For Quainter Quarantimes

OH HELLO I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE. All right. Let’s light the tires, kick the fires. Is that right? Whatever. Miniature blog posts in 3, 2, 1… *flips switch*

The dogs of authors, on display. Today! Do not forget: author pet show!

Wait, it’s fucking July already?! That’s it. Time is broken. The calendar is a shuddering, sparking machine. I’m surprised my watch doesn’t just show a man on fire shrugging vigorously.

Right now, as I type this, blue jays are shit mad at something outside. I’m curiously getting pretty good at discerning what precisely it is they’re mad at — for instance, there’s a Cooper’s Hawk around, and I know their alarm cries when it comes by. This isn’t that. I’m betting crow? They get salty as fuck at crows. One thing I saw and found fascinating about blue jays: one day our yard jays were sounding the beak-bells about the Cooper’s Hawk, and other jays showed up. Like, a lot of them. They streamed in from two different directions, all joining the din. They called in the goddamn blue jay air force. It was a thing to behold, and I don’t know that I was aware that birds of that sort had any level of… allegiance to one another? Either that, or they were rubber-neckers. Just a buncha oglers like people who come out of their houses when there’s sirens or noise outside. HEY WHAT’S GOING ON. YEAH NO I’M NOT INVESTED IN THIS I JUST WANNA SEE. ARE YOUSE GONNA FIGHT OR WHAT. I’M GOIN BACK INSIDE.

But, I do like that some birds flock together. We’ve long had flocks of certain birds flock together — it’s not unusual, for instance, for certain feeder birds to hang out. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and the like. What’s been interesting this year is seeing a gaggle of chickadee fledglings and a flurry of titmice fledglings play together. Literally play. Chasing each other up and around trees, bopping about. Not for food, just zipping around this way and that. I’m perhaps anthropomorphizing this behavior, but I’m not a BIRDOLOGIST so I’m not married to scientific rigor, it just seems to me like the only explanation is some measure of play — which I’m sure has value for them as it does for humans. But it also is suggestive of a greater intelligence than you’d think for such a tiny little nitwit bird, and a greater sense of society, if it can possibly be called that.

Hey, did you know there’s still a pandemic? Turns out, yup, it’s still rockin’ and rollin’, this whole thing. But I don’t know that people believe it? Who needs facts and experts and reality, when literally anything can be politicized and turned into a both-sides argument?

I think what floors me the most is people who aren’t taking it seriously, but also, who think they’re taking it seriously. What I mean is, you hear stories of friends-of-friends who are like, “Yes, mmm, coronavirus, very bad, very bad, wear your masks everyone! Social distancing is important! Anyway, me and my family were in Myrtle Beach last night and had a great time at a bar, and we met some other friends from Florida and Texas, and then we went to three different house parties — oh man, the last one was a real rager, we all played this great new game called HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU COUGH IN EACH OTHER’S MOUTHS, and gosh, it was wild. Anyway! We’re back home now and I’m eating in restaurants for every meal and inhaling toilet plumes to get high, but don’t forget, wear your masks and social distance.”

Our numbers remain low, but in two weeks, now that we’re effectively reopened? We’ll see. They’re talking about opening schools in the fall, which to be is paradoxically both a) essential and b) impossible. I just don’t know how you do it. And a lot of schools are demanding parents make a choice of EITHER/OR — you either choose to have your kid go to school physically, or choose a totally digital path, and, uhhh. Ennh? To me, a mix feels smartest — stagger kids going, so you can limit numbers in classrooms, get them as much outdoor time as possible, and so on. But a lot of schools, even good ones, have abysmal ventilation. And they’re not gonna make kids wear masks or socially distance. They’re guaranteeing… I think three feet? Which I appreciate is hard to get kids to not be near one another, so, I grok the problem. I just don’t know the fix, and the fix seems to be, “well, fuck it.” Which is kinda the fix for everything these days, isn’t it?

There’s a passage in Wanderers that I think has become the one most quoted to me. It’s not part of the book proper — it’s an epigraph, one of the “flavor text” chapter openers. I post it here for shits and giggles, because… well, it feels dangerously appropriate.

A most troublesome thing is that people think they know this disease. And they don’t. “It’s just the flu, it’s just a respiratory disease, it won’t kill you.” We’ve a number of family friends who’ve had it, and it’s a wildly mixed bag. One is completely lost to the throes of autoimmune encephalitis, trapped in his own burning brain, staring down the barrel of a long or maybe eternal hospital or facility stay. Others report, even three months later, spikes of fatigue, or loss of smell and taste, or other strange little symptoms. Even in our area, I think the hospitals have said that “fever” isn’t even the most telling symptom anymore — so temperature checks aren’t worth a damn. We’re still a long ways out from really understanding what this thing is, and what it can do. Wear a mask. That seems to help. Socially distance, when you can. Wash your hands. JFC. And holy shit don’t go to bars or parties.

The best Mission: Impossible movie is Fallout. And that’s because of Henry Cavill locking and loading his fists in the bathroom fight scene. No, this isn’t relevant to anything, but I figured it was good to break the mood and stop talking about the pandemic, which will one day go away, but the Mission: Impossible films will remain.

What have we been watching lately? Hmmm. There’s a spate of dipshit game shows we’ve been liking. Holey Moley is like exxxtreme mini-golf, and that’s on Hulu. Floor is Lava is on Netflix, and though it gets a little repetitious, it’s still a delight watching people faceplant and then slide unceremoniously into lava. (And the show makes you think they’re being pulled under, never to return.) We watched Hercules on Disney+ because we’d never seen it and now I wish we could go back to that kinder era. (Okay it wasn’t that bad, it was fun and funny but basically a brainless Looney Tunes telling of Greek Myth.) I keep trying to watch the Birds of Prey movie, and I’m about 75% through it, and I like it a good deal, but it’s hard to watch proper R-rated movies when you’re in a house where your kid really can’t go anywhere for two hours. But we do watch Letterkenny. Twenty-minute bursts of foul-mouthed Canadian hicktown shenanigans. Think early Kevin Smith, but redneckier, and in Canada.

Speaking of madcap mini-golf… if you haven’t played What The Golf? on Nintendo Switch, fix your shit immediately. Boy that’s fun. And weird. And rarely difficult, but occasionally tricky. Brilliant game design that makes fun of itself and all of game design.

Just a reminder, I’m still off of Twitter right now. I think the account is still locked, though I’ll fix that… I dunno, eventually. But even then, I intend to trim it up and use it mostly for signal boost and book-stuff. I suspect my time there has largely sunsetted, and at this point I fear I’m giving a lot more to it than it is giving to me. (And a reminder too, the locking-of-said-account was due to the Internet Archive kerfuffle. I’d seen folks like Pablo Hidalgo go full lockdown, and honestly it seemed more peaceful, so I did that.)

Also to remind you, no I am not suing the Internet Archive. I got a handful of emails this week, some trolling, some earnest, asking me to stop my lawsuit against them, and I’d like to remind you not to believe everything that enters your eyeballs on this here internet. You can go check the suit — I am not named in it, nor are my books. I did not “lead the charge,” and in fact, outside of some dumb tweets, have absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn’t even ask them to remove my own books, much less get litigious about it. I do not want the Wayback Machine to go away, and am not responsible for anything that happens there. So, I cannot pull my lawsuit, because I have no lawsuit to pull. Go bother publishers, who are further not acting on my behalf. Cool? Cool.

I think that’s it for now. Here are some photos. Including those BABBY TITMICE.